Evaluating Petroleum Supply Chain Performance: Overcoming Shortcomings of Balanced Scorecard

Supply chain management has become a common tool for ensuring success of business organizations. Measurement of supply chain performance is required to understand how successfully supply chain management has been implemented in a firm. Various methods have been suggested for doing this. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) presents a fairly comprehensive model for evaluating supply chains. However, even BSC has its shortcomings. This paper tries to suggest ways to overcome some of its shortcomings by considering the case of the petroleum supply chain. By elevating the BSC from organizational level to industry level it can been used for benchmarking one supply chain against another; something which is not possible with the way BSC is being used currently. This can substantially enhance the flexibility of using BSC for performance evaluation. The paper also suggests a way to combine dissimilar metrics so that a single number can be obtained which signifies the performance of the supply chain.